The Usual Suspects

You can’t tell the players apart without a program. These are the most popular and widely known suspects for the real identity of D.B. Cooper.

Robert Rackstraw 

This suspect is the man being promoted by the Citizen Sleuths, whose investigation was featured on the History Channel. Rackstraw was trained in the military as a parachutist. He was kicked out of the military for lying about his education. In 1971, Rackstraw was living with his stepfather and cashing $75,000 in fake checks. A warrant was issued for his arrest because of the checks, but when they went to his house they found his stepfather dead from a bullet to the head. Rackstraw fled to Iran. He returned to America in 1978 and was questioned for the murder of his stepfather and the D.B. Cooper hijacking.

Colbert and the History Channel were discredited by many when it was learned that they had tried to bribe Rackstraw with 1 million dollars and a movie deal if he confessed to the hijacking in their documentary. Rackstraw refused the offer.


Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. 

A few months after the Cooper hijacking, McCoy hijacked a 727 headed to Reno and skydived out the back stairs with $500,000. However, unlike D.B. Cooper, he left fingerprints all over the plane and was arrested. His wife was an accomplice, but she denies the Cooper hijacking as did McCoy. McCoy broke out of jail and was on the run for 3 months before he was killed in a shootout with police. His family reports that McCoy was in Nevada on the date of the hijacking.      


Sheridan Peterson

Eric Ulis the author who claims Peterson was D.B. Cooper with his 100+ page report, "DB Cooper: The Definitive Investigation of Sheridan Peterson." Ulis claims, incorrectly, that Peterson is one of three suspects whose DNA was compared to the DNA on the tie. The other two are Duane Weber and Lynn Doyle CooperHe is the only one of the three DNA-compared suspects who has not been publicly cleared by the FBI. Ulis also claims that Peterson owns a set of cufflinks which were sold with the D.B. Cooper tie clasp.


Duane Weber

Those who say Weber is D.B. Cooper cite that he was at the very spot on Tena Bank four months prior to the money being found by Brian Ingram. Weber confessed to his wife on his death bed.


Lynn Doyle Cooper 

Lynn Cooper was obsessed with a French comic book which featured a character named Dan Cooper, which is the name given at the ticket counter. His niece, Marla Cooper, claims that he came home with a bloody shirt on the day of the hijacking saying that he was hurt in an auto accident. Marla also stated that she heard Lynn tell his brother, “We did it, our money problems are over. We hijacked an airplane.” His DNA was compared to the tie.


Kenneth Christianson

Christianson's brother Lyle was the first to suspect him. Christianson was a military paratrooper in WWII. He later worked as a flight attendant for Northwest Orient. Kenneth bought a house shortly after the hijacking.

As he was dying from cancer in 1994, Christianson called his brother over to say, “There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you.” Lyle didn’t press him. He also had a folder of Northwest Orient news clippings right up to the date of the hijacking, they then stopped.


Barbara Dayton

Barbara was a transwoman raised with the name Robert until a sex change operation in 1969. The group pushing her case are the Forman family who claim she started planning after the operation and was angry and broke because she was turned down by the Airforce and the airlines because of bad vision. She died in 2002.


William Gossett

Gossett is suspected to be D.B. Cooper by Galen Cook. Gossett was an Air Force veteran of Vietnam and Korea trained in parachuting and wilderness survival. Cook claims that Gossett confessed to a friend. Gossett’s son also believes that he was Cooper and that he spent the entire amount gambling.


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